Energy & Climate: It's All About The Systems

Video of the event is available here

The world, like the human body, has many systems that work together to maintain homeostasis. In the human body they are the nervous, respiratory, excretory, muscular, endocrine, lymphatic (immune), integumentary, digestive, skeletal, circulatory, and reproductive systems. Earth has many more than that, and understanding how they all interconnect is complicated, yet essential to creating sustainability.

On July 21st, Jed Shilling, Hans Herren, and Andrea Bassi from the Millennium Institute and Peter Schultz from the US Climate Change Science Program helped us better understand that - it's all about systems.

Over the past 20 years, the Millennium Institute has been developing the Threshold 21 model to integrate the economic, social, and environmental sectors into a single, dynamic framework representing the critical relations within and across sectors, thus enabling transparency in the feedback loops.

A version of T21 has been developed to focus on critical energy factors in the US and North America in the context of the global energy markets. This version allows the user to analyze the effects of different assumptions about energy availability from different sources and via different energy policies over a 50 year time horizon.

The July 21st Energy Conversation included a full description of The T21 USA/NA model, as well as results that have been produced for the Association for the Studies of Peak Oil and Gas and the National Commission on Energy Policy. Participants will be invited to propose alternative policies and assumptions, some of which can be tested "live" with the model on the spot.